Polly gazed at him for a long moment as he stared at his hands. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me all those things you did.’

He looked up at her, a faint smile twisting his features. ‘Catharsis?’

‘Maybe.’

And so, in terse, leaden sentences, Tack told her. When he had finished, Polly reached out and pressed her hand down on his.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Tack asked.

Confused by what she was feeling, Polly leaned forwards and kissed him on the lips. For a moment it appeared he did not know how to respond, then he reached out to press his hand against the back of her head, returning the kiss with a kind of desperation.

Sorry to break up this romantic moment, but a shitstorm just arrived.

Polly sometimes wished Nandru had a face she could slap.

20

Modification Status Report:

That pain again. Perhaps I should have removed him at the foetal stage and continued his growth in the tank as I did with Amanita, but in me there is the abiding instinct to nurture my creation. Perhaps it is only that I should have made some modification to my womb to withstand the abrasion of his hardening carapace. Blood tests have shown that, unlike his sister, he is not poisoning me. His prematurely developed immune system is so alien it does not seek to attack his mother, whereas hers was just human enough to recognize the vessel that contained it. But there’s something… I am reluctant to run another scan, as that process in itself can be damaging to delicate tissues, and truthfully I do not want to find out if there is anything going wrong.

Damn… it’s just not stopping… getting worse… must scan… must…

As he ran the whetstone along the edge of his gladius, Tacitus could see that Cheng-yi was angry. The man was angry at Polly’s continual rejection of him, angry at the low regard in which Aconite held him, and now he was angry that all his hard work to teach mahjong to the Neanderthal was paying off- for Ygrol was beating him. But the Chinaman would not start getting openly offensive—he’d tried that once with Ygrol already and suffered concussion for the following three days. The Neanderthal tended to react either with smiling delight or with his club. There was no middle ground.

Living up to his name, Lostboy was sitting staring blankly into space, and Tacitus wondered if his own and Cheng-yi’s addition to the boy’s programming had been to the good. Aconite’s Pedagogue had taught them enough to construct a program that would enable the boy to swim, and to load it, but their knowledge was certainly not anything like as extensive as the heliothant’s. Tacitus was even considering wiping what they had installed and going to ask Aconite what had gone wrong, when the outer door whoomphed open and the Umbrathane intruders entered, discarding rain capes and removing their masks.

Holding her carbine in readiness across her stomach, Makali marched to the centre of the room, her five fellows spreading out behind her as she scanned the surrounding area.

‘Where is the killer?’ she demanded.

Tacitus merely continued sharpening his sword, while Cheng-yi and Ygrol quietly proceeded with their game.

‘Very well, then tell me where that piece-of-shit heliothant is,’ Makali spat into the silence.

Tacitus felt a familiar surge of anger, and the whetstone slipped. He put a bloody finger in his mouth and watched while the umbrathant marched over to the mahjong table and swept its pieces onto the floor.

‘I asked a question!’

‘I think you asked two questions,’ Cheng-yi smart-mouthed.

Makali backhanded him and he went flying out of his chair to sprawl on the floor. Tacitus stood. This was bad, not because of Makali’s violent behaviour, but because of the expression now on Ygrol’s face—he had been about to win the game.

‘Ygrol,’ Tacitus murmured warningly, stepping forward.

‘Far enough, Roman.’

Tacitus had not even seen the Umbrathane male move round the room to come up behind him. He froze, feeling a hand on his shoulder and the barrel of a handgun pressed against his cheek.

‘Perhaps you don’t think I’m serious.’ Without even looking in the direction she was pointing her carbine, Makali pulled the trigger. Lostboy’s head blew open, flowering around the blockish cerebral augmentation, which clattered onto the floor as he slid from his chair. ‘I’m serious.’

Flinging the games table aside, Ygrol came up with a roar, his bone club raised. Tacitus felt his mouth go dry as he saw how fast two of Makali’s fellows shot in front of her, one of them stamping on Cheng-yi’s head in passing as the Chinaman tried to rise. The first to reach the Neanderthal knocked away his club, then both umbrathants dragged him to his chair and forced him down into it. No matter how Ygrol strained he could not get up, and bellowed as Makali strolled forward to pick up the bone club and inspect it. She turned to Tacitus.

‘Where is the killer? And where is Aconite?’

Aconite almost certainly knew about the arrival of these intruders, Tacitus supposed, but perhaps she was taking needed time to prepare, so he kept his mouth firmly shut. Without taking her eyes off Tacitus, Makali brought the bone club up hard to smash into Ygrol’s face. Still seeing no reaction from the Roman, she turned on the Neanderthal and began to lay into him. As blood spattered her face and prosthetic arms, Tacitus realized that any answer he might give would not alter the outcome of what was happening here. Cowl had let Makali off the leash.

It was over in a minute, Ygrol’s broken head lolling to one side.

‘Well now,’ said Makali. ‘I guess we’ll have to see what I can do with that sword of yours.’

‘I’m here,’ spoke a new voice.

Aconite had entered the room from her research area. Tacitus could see her rage and he prepared himself to do whatever was required of him.

‘I think you’re a little late for this party,’ said Makali, inspecting the blood runneling in the circuit patterns on the bone club she held.

Aconite clicked her fingers and a sudden deep droning filled the room, along with a blast of air. Wasp rose vertically into view, its wings a blur behind it, and a glistening sting extruded into view. It drove forwards as one of the umbrathants turned towards it. He bowed over as it slammed into him, the sting going in through his chest and out of his back. Then the sting flicked and discarded him. Tacitus reversed his sword, its blade alongside his ribcage, and thrust back into the umbrathant behind him, turning as he did so. There came a gagging crunch from the man, and muzzle fire skinned the Roman’s cheekbone. The bone club became a blurred wheel in the air, before it was caught and shattered in Aconite’s massive hand. Pulling his gladius free from his dying captor, Tacitus threw it underhand, spearing its way towards Makali’s back. Then a shot smacked into his chest and he staggered back, stumbling over the umbrathant he had impaled. He saw Makali whip round, impossibly fast, catching the gladius by the handle, bringing it over her head and almost casually squatting down to drive it through Cheng-yi’s back to pin him to the floor. With teeth bared she pulled some device from her belt and aimed it at Wasp. The room whited out for a second, then the robot dropped out of the air and crashed to the floor.

‘You think we didn’t know?’ said Makali.

The same white-out again. Now Aconite falling like an oak tree.

Tacitus slid down, with his back to the wall. He stared down at his shattered body—he had done his best.

Silleck was one of the few interface technicians who had survived, and like all of them only because she had torn herself away from her vorpal controls. Now, with open wounds in her scalp and undetached nubs of vorpal glass embedded in her skull like little windows into her brain, she suffered a headache that just would not go away. Only time would cure that, as the damaged tissue of her meninges healed around the vorpal fibres entering her brain. But she would never be rid of the facility to slide into a perception that stepped one dimension above that of her fellow, un-interfaced Heliothane. Gazing across the mountainside, she observed the survivors setting up their camps for the coming night; while, sliding into further perception, she saw them preparing to do this, and their camps already made. Watching also the endless flow of the beast into the wormhole, she saw images that both repelled and fascinated her.